London Banter - View Single Post

Roland Perry · October 28th 16, 01:16 PM posted to uk.transport.london

In message , at 07:46:16
on Fri, 28 Oct 2016, remarked:
My 3-year Senior Railcard expired on Tuesday so on Monday I renewed it
online. It turns out they add a week to the renewal expiry date for online
renewals to allow for posting the cards out. The new card actually arrived
in the post on Tuesday.

Yesterday I tried to register the railcard on my Oyster card at a ticket
machine at Liverpool St station. When the assistant typed in the 01/11/2019
expiry date it was rejected, apparently for being more than 3 years in the
future. He tried 01/11/19 too. Nothing he or his colleagues could do would
get the railcard registered to the Oyster card.

Luckily I had my bike with me and wasn't planning to use Oyster yesterday.
My next visit to London when I might need Oyster won't be till after 1st
November.

But why doesn't TfL recognise that railcard expiry can be more than 3 years
away, even if by only a week? This failure must surely be in breach of their
contract with ATOC?

They might well say "only attempt that when on your first trip on or
after 1/11/16".

Transport companies are very weak when it comes to IT - hence why I've
had a prepaid bus carnet card unpredictably decide it was out of date on
my first attempted trip one January, and an ITSO card (East Midlands
Trains) which had been given a birth date as the issue date, so was
unable to sell me other than child tickets.

The bus company put into place measures to cure the former (as long as
you were prepared to visit their office), but I never did get EMT staff
to even understand what the problem was.

"We've not been trained on it, **** off". They'll make ideal employees
for a re-nationalised MML.
--
Roland Perry